Lively, informative, and great fun: the perfect introduction to Odysseus and the society that shaped his exploits.
Synthesizing material from the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other ancient sources, a “biography” of the legendary Greek hero that doubles as a vivid history of Bronze Age customs and beliefs.
Situating Odysseus’ life in the second millennium b.c.e., the author reminds us that this “king” was more like a local chieftain than the monarch of a post-medieval nation-state, and he ruled a rocky island 17 miles long, 4 miles wide. In Ithaca, as in the rest of the ancient world, even the elite lived simply, close to the land. Political relationships were intensely personal, oiled by lavish exchanges of gifts and ironclad rules of hospitality whose violation played a crucial role in the Trojan war and in many acts of Odysseus that seem horrifyingly brutal to modern readers. (The slaughter of Penelope’s suitors, for example.) Beye (Classics Emeritus/CUNY; Ancient Epic Poetry, 1993, etc.) accepts the traditional portrait of his hero as cunning, cold, ruthless, essentially a loner in a society dominated by male friendships—“the protean man,” in other words: “hated by many, respected by most, doubted, suspected, not exactly liked except by women. But then being liked was not one of the concerns of a prince in the Greek Bronze Age.” The author’s lucid chronological narrative of Odysseus’ career is written in witty, deliberately colloquial prose. Only when describing his subject’s sex life does Beye lapse into jarring anachronisms (“Circe was, he dimly realized, the woman of his masturbatory fantasies and his wet dreams finally come true”); in general, his breezy approach helps readers to grasp the nature of long-ago experiences while realizing how very differently these people thought and behaved. Early chapters covering less well-known events in Odysseus’ youth are particularly fascinating, but Beye’s accounts of the Trojan War, the hero’s ten years of wandering, and his return to Ithaca also benefit from the author’s formidable, yet lightly worn, erudition.
Lively, informative, and great fun: the perfect introduction to Odysseus and the society that shaped his exploits.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-0024-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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